Carnival in a Fix

by Philip Reeve

  “Don’t you have school to go to, Emily?” Jinks asked hopefully.

  “Not today,” Emily told him. “Floomish Spoob says that it’s very bad for children to have to go to school two days running.”

  “Hmmph,” said Jinks, watching O’Hare adjust an adjustable spanner. “Well, I’m sure you have a lot of other things you want to be doing….”

  “Not really,” said Emily. “I’m just going to watch you.”

  She had learned that sometimes, if she watched Jinks and O’Hare work for long enough, Mr. Jinks would get self-conscious and find something for her do, like scraping the rust off an old bumper car, or painting new gold twirly bits on the carousel horses, which was completely brilliant. She looked around for somewhere to sit, and decided that the slide itself looked comfiest. At the bottom of the slide, a lot of the hairy mats that people slid down on had been scattered on the ground. Emily picked one up and dragged it over to the end of the slide. Jinks and O’Hare had opened the front of a big control box that stood near the ticket booth, and they were peering worriedly inside. They didn’t notice what Emily was doing until she was about to sit down on the mat. Then O’Hare looked up. He dropped his tools and came running toward Emily, waving his long, hairy arms.

  “No!” shouted Jinks. “Don’t sit on the slide! There’s been a serious gravity inversion….”

  Emily was about to ask what a gravity inversion was, but just then she found out. Almost as soon as her bottom landed on the mat, she began moving. She wasn’t sure what was happening at first, but then, as the movement grew faster and faster, she understood. She was sliding up the Space Twizzler. That was what Jinks must have meant about the gravity thing, she thought, clutching the edge of the mat and squeaking in fright as it began to whirl its way up the enormous slide. The helter-skelter was working backward!

  “Heeeeellllpppp!” shouted Emily.

  As she slid up the first twist of the Twizzler, she saw Jinks and O’Hare gawking up at her. As she slid up the second, they were scampering toward their car. By the time she was on the third, she was moving so fast that everything below was just a blur. “Heeeeeeeellllp!” she screamed as she went spiraling higher and higher, up through the clouds and into sunshine. Starbuses went past, with parties of schoolchildren peering at her out the windows as they descended toward the spaceport. The Space Twizzler was one of the best helter-skelters on Funfair Moon, and Emily had always loved sliding down it. But sliding up it was no fun at all because she couldn’t help worrying about what was going to happen when she got to the top.

  Luckily, the Twizzler wasn’t one of those helter-skelters that have a lid on them, like a sugar bowl. At the top of the slide was a wide, open platform with a handrail around it, where you could stand and look out over the fair while you waited for your turn.

  Unluckily, Emily was going so fast when she reached the top of the slide that she kept going, shooting straight over the handrail and out into the empty air. As the top of the Space Twizzler fell away below, she thought she saw something go scurrying across it—a small spiny black something, like an inky sea urchin. But she couldn’t see it clearly, and a moment later, she couldn’t see it at all—the view of the fair spread out below her, and the thought of the long drop to the ground made her squeeze her eyes tight shut.

  And then, just as she was wondering how long it would take before she hit the ground, she hit something else instead. Something soft, furry, and unexpected. For a second, she thought she had collided with a passing cloud, but when she opened one eye and then the other, she found that the thing she had hit was solid and definitely hairy. In fact, it was definitely O’Hare-y. The furry repairman was holding Emily tight in his big furry arms, and when she looked down, she saw that he was standing on the roof of the little flying car, which Mr. Jinks was driving.

  Jinks twitched one eyestalk so that he was looking straight up at her through the car’s glass roof. “Have you got her, Mr. O’Hare?” he asked. “Well, don’t hang about out there admiring the view. Bring her inside, and let’s get back down to ground level.”

  O’Hare opened a panel in the roof and lowered Emily gently down through it into the backseat.

  “Next time someone tells you to stay away from a broken ride, young lady, I hope you’ll listen.” Jinks glowered. “The Space Twizzler started working in reverse last night. The people who were sliding down it when it first went wrong were all shot straight back up, flew off the top, and landed in the cotton-candy vats. That’s where you would have ended up if I hadn’t had the quick thinking to fly the aircar up here and position O’Hare ready to catch you.”

  O’Hare poured himself down through the roof and landed in the passenger seat, giving Mr. Jinks a hard stare, and a shrug that said What do you mean, you had the idea?

  “Well, all right, it was O’Hare’s idea,” admitted Jinks. “But it was me who kept us hovering in position. It took nerves of steel.”

  They both gave Emily a long, severe stare.

  “Thank you,” said Emily with what she hoped was a repentant expression. And she meant it. She thought they’d been very brave, flying up to save her like that. She would have hated to crash into a cotton-candy vat. It would have been such a waste of cotton candy.

  “Hmmph,” said Jinks, and started steering the car back down. “Well, don’t do it again. Now, Mr. O’Hare, we need to get this Twizzler sorted out. The problem is in the control box. All our rides have their own gravity generator, since Funfair Moon is too small to have much gravity of its own. This one has been reversed somehow. I can’t imagine how it happened. Or how we’re going to sort it out.”

  “Let me help!” said Emily eagerly.

  “No!” said Jinks. Mr. O’Hare looked away and shrugged, and Emily slouched her own shoulders in frustration.

  “I’m sorry, Emily,” Jinks went on as he steered the little car carefully down to land at the foot of the Twizzler. “This is a very serious problem, and we can’t have a little hatchling interfering, sticking her fingers into live circuits and getting tangled up in the gravity fields. We need to get this Twizzler sorted out before the inspector comes….”

  But they were too late. When the car settled into the grass and Mr. O’Hare flipped the roof open, there was the funfair inspector himself standing at the entrance, scowling at the OUT OF ORDER sign.

  “What is going on here?” he sniffed. “Trouble with this helter-skelter, is there?”

  “Certainly not!” said Mr. Jinks. “We were just doing some routine checks, and we haven’t had time to take the sign down.”

  “I see,” said the inspector. He nodded to Miss Weebly, who made a note on her clipboard. “Very well. If the helter-skelter is in use, we’d better test it, hadn’t we, Miss Weebly?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Moonbottom!” she twittered, and went hurrying through the entrance to the elevator that carried people up to the top of the Twizzler.

  “No!” shouted Jinks.

  O’Hare ran after her. He overtook her and stepped in front of the elevator door, barring the way with his hairy arms spread wide.

  “Whatever is the matter?” asked the funfair inspector.

  O’Hare shrugged.

  “Um…,” said Jinks.

  Emily could see that he needed rescuing. Mr. Jinks was a terrible liar. He couldn’t think of a thing to say. So she said something instead.

  “You don’t need to go up in the elevator!” she said. “This isn’t a helter-skelter. It’s a skelter-helter.”

  “A skelter-helter?” asked Mr. Moonbottom.

  “I’m not sure I’ve heard of one of those,” said Miss Weebly.

  “It’s exactly like a helter-skelter, only the other way around,” said Emily. She picked up a mat from the pile and handed it to Miss Weebly. “Just sit down on that at the bottom of the slide.”

  “Like this?” asked Miss Weebly, setting the mat down carefully and sitting. “Well, how very odd. I—Ooooh!”

  Jinks and O’Hare were already running
to their aircar. Emily and Mr. Moonbottom watched as Miss Weebly shot up the slide, going faster and faster, until she was just a blur.

  “Wheeeeeeeee!” she said.

  “Hmmm,” said Mr. Moonbottom.

  A few seconds later, his assistant was back, carried safely to ground level by the aircar. She was rather flushed and her hair was standing up on end, but she seemed to have enjoyed herself. “Wow!” she said. “That was such fun! Can I have another go?”

  “Really, Miss Weebly,” snapped Mr. Moonbottom. “We’re not here to enjoy ourselves. We have a great many other rides to inspect. Come on!”

  He turned and stalked away toward the next ride, and Miss Weebly hurried after him.

  Jinks slumped against the aircar, holding his head in his hands. “This is dreadful! What bad luck! A surprise inspection on the very day that something goes seriously wrong!”

  “Er, excuse me, Mr. Jinks,” said someone who had been waiting nearby. It was Midge Flimsy, who went to school with Emily. Her mom and dad ran a hook-the-duck attraction on nearby Sideshow Hill. “The Space Twizzler isn’t the only thing that’s gone seriously wrong! My dad sent me to find you. Our duck pond has sprung a leak!”

  Mr. O’Hare’s hair stood on end, and Mr. Jinks turned green with worry. (Actually he was green to start with, but he turned a different shade of green.) Emily could understand why they were so alarmed. Since Funfair Moon’s visitors came from all over the galaxy, it had to have stalls and rides in every shape and size to cater to different types of aliens. Most people fit all right into human-sized rides, but for those who didn’t, there were tiny merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels, which looked like super-detailed toys, and gigantic ones, which even thirty-foot-tall Arcturan dung beetles and Blovarian ultra-titans could enjoy. The Flimsys’ sideshow was designed for Blovarian children, whose huge hands were way too big to manage the bamboo poles that most people used to hook ordinary-sized plastic ducks at ordinary-sized sideshows. The poles on Midge’s dad Bob’s stall were made from old telegraph poles, and his giant customers used them to hook giant ducks out of a huge tank of water. Looking uphill between the candy stalls and carnival games, Emily could see the tank perched on the summit. Midge’s mom and dad were frantically trying to plug a little hole in its side, from which a long jet of water was shooting out. As Emily watched, another hole opened, and then another….

  “If that tank splits, it will flood this whole part of the fair!” shouted Jinks, running toward the aircar. “We’ll be waist-deep in water and giant rubber ducks! Quick, O’Hare! We need to get up there!”

  “Can I co—?” Emily started to say. She thought they might not mind her tagging along after she had handled the funfair inspector so well. But Mr. O’Hare looked down at her and firmly shook his head. Then he grabbed his toolbox and jumped into the car beside Jinks. The car took off and went speeding toward the hilltop, with Midge hurrying along in its shadow.

  Emily looked glumly after them, wondering how many more years she would have to spend Growing Up before Jinks would let her fix something. How was she supposed to get any practice if they never let her help?

  Just then, someone else came running up. It was the owner of Funfair Moon’s famous ghost train. He was a plump alien with two heads, and both of them were called Stan. “Are Jinks and O’Hare here?” he panted. “I need their help! Something’s gone wrong with my ghost train. People are saying there aren’t any ghosts in it! They’re asking for their money back!”

  “No ghosts?” asked Emily. That sounded impossible. She’d never been inside the ghost train herself because it sounded really scary. Everyone knew it was the most haunted ghost train in the known galaxy. It was simply stuffed with ghosts.

  “I don’t know what could have happened!” Stan wailed. “I need Jinks and O’Hare to take a look around inside….”

  “Well, they’re rather busy at the moment,” said Emily, and pointed up the hill, where her friends were trying to patch the duck tank. Suddenly, a whole section of the tank’s side gave way, letting out a gush of water and a huge yellow duck, which knocked Jinks off his feet and went rolling downhill to smash into a balloon-popping dart game.

  “I’ll tell them about the ghost train as soon as they’re finished up there,” Emily promised.

  Stan looked unhappy. “Well, I just hope they can come and sort my spooks out soon. I’ve heard there’s a funfair inspector going around. If he finds I’m running a ghost train with no ghosts, there’ll be all kinds of trouble. It’s probably against all the regulations….”

  Emily saw his point. “I tell you what,” she said, in her best Taking Charge voice. “I’ll come and look at your ghost train for you.”

  “You?” asked Stan, looking surprised and doubtful. (It’s easy to do two expressions at once if you’ve got two heads.)

  “Yes,” explained Emily. “I’m Jinks and O’Hare’s assistant. I’m part of their team. They’re teaching me everything they know.”

  “Really?” said Stan, both faces looking doubtful now. But he could tell that Jinks and O’Hare were going to be busy with the duck tank for a while, so he let Emily take his hand and lead him back toward the ghost train.

  Funfair Moon was filling up with happy visitors. Emily hoped the funfair inspector was mingling with the crowds on the fairway and noticing all their happy smiles and the fun that they were having. But ahead, a gray cloud loomed in the sky. It was always there, that cloud: it was the tethered storm that hung above the ghost train.

  There was only one ghost train on Funfair Moon, but it was BIG. It looked like a huge, crumbling mansion, with hundreds of windows and towers and turrets and domes and fiddly lightning conductors. The lightning conductors were constantly fizzing and flickering with the lightning that flashed down out of the big thundercloud hanging overhead. The architect who had designed the place had heard about old houses having an east wing and a west wing, but she hadn’t quite understood what that meant, so she had given this house actual wings: they were huge and batlike, and they stuck out of the roof and flapped slowly all the time. That was what kept the thundercloud slowly turning, like the froth on a well-stirred cup of coffee.

  Usually there was a line of little railway pods going in at one end of the ghost train, full of excited kids blowing raspberries and laughing and saying they weren’t scared, because there was No Such Thing as Ghosts. Usually there was another line of little pods coming out the other end, full of quivering kids too scared to speak, with chattering teeth and hair that stood on end as if they’d been electrified by fright. Today there were no pods going in at all, and the few people coming out didn’t look scared, just bored. Some of them came over to complain when they saw Stan and Emily. “That wasn’t very scary!” they said. “I never saw so much as a whisker of a ghost! Not a phantom sausage. We want our money back!”

  “You see the trouble?” said Stan. “I don’t know what’s wrong. My ghosts are professionals; they’ve never let us down before. I presume you have a special ghost detector with you?”

  Emily hadn’t. She wasn’t even sure if Jinks and O’Hare carried such things. She said, “I’ll have a look inside, and then I can report back to Jinks and O’Hare.”

  Stan helped her into one of the ghost train pods. She was still feeling a bit nervous about riding the ghost train, but at least the pod was comfortable, like a little open-topped car with squishy seats. It was powered by the electricity that came down the lightning conductors from the storm cloud overhead. Lit up by the flashes of lightning, the haunted mansion looked scarier than ever. Emily started to wonder if this was really a good idea. She turned to tell Stan that she had decided to wait for Jinks and O’Hare after all—but Stan had already gone back to his control kiosk! He threw a lever, and spooky music started playing as the pod began to move.

  There was no turning back now, thought Emily—not without looking like a complete scaredy-cat. She held on tightly to the armrests of her seat. The pod trundled and squeaked along the rails, and we
nt into the haunted house through an arched opening, where tickly curtains of cobweb hung.

  The rails the pod rolled on ran through shadowy rooms, along narrow, spooky corridors, up and down stairways. Emily started to feel a bit better. It wasn’t as frightening as she’d expected. Scary-looking faces glowered down at the pod, but they were only paintings. Nothing reached out to clutch at Emily; nothing jumped out from dark corners, going “Booo!” Secretly, Emily was quite pleased about that, but she could see why the customers had looked so disappointed.

  “Not a ghost in sight!” she said to herself.

  The pod banged through big double doors into a huge room filled with potted plants and creepy suits of armor. In the shadows, Emily thought she saw something move. She leaned out of the pod for a better look, but just then it jolted over a hump in the track.

  “Eek!” said Emily, tumbling out.

  By the time she had picked herself up and brushed the dust off, the pod was vanishing through another set of doors. She ran after it, but the doors had locked themselves.

  “Bother!” said Emily. She tried not to feel too scared, all alone in the huge, dark room.

  Or perhaps not quite all alone…Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a movement.

  “Hello?” she said nervously.

  “Hello,” said a small voice coming from behind a rubber plant. It sounded even more nervous than hers did. “Who are you?” it asked.

  “I’m Emily,” said Emily. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a ghost,” said the voice.

  Emily wondered if she should be frightened, but the ghost didn’t sound very frightening, and when it drifted out from behind the rubber plant, it didn’t look very frightening, either. It was a small ghost, about the size of a pillowcase, and it was holding a cuddly stuffed penguin.